School district to consider possibility of new magnet programs

Paul Schott

Updated 11:32 pm, Monday, July 29, 2013

School officials will present at Tuesday's Board of Education meeting a preliminary proposal to open new magnet programs at Parkway School and North Street School to address the racial imbalance and building capacity issues facing the town's 11 elementary schools.

The magnet plan surfaces about six weeks after the school board settled on a shortlist of options to consider before its Oct. 10 target date for adopting a course of action to tackle the racial imbalance and building use challenges. Limited redistricting and the expansion of New Lebanon School are also still on the table, after the board jettisoned at its June 20 meeting more far-reaching and contentious possibilities such as full redistricting and reconfiguring the grades housed at each school.

"We want to base this as much as we can on voluntary choice," Superintendent of Schools William McKersie said Monday. "We've heard clearly the concern about redistricting. This is a first and foremost a choice-based approach."

The Parkway-North Street magnet proposal has emerged from a "work group" of administrators assembled during the summer to evaluate options for addressing the racial imbalance and facility use issues. The team includes McKersie and the principals of Parkway, North Street, New Lebanon, Hamilton Avenue School and The International School at Dundee.

District administrators propose to research and design the two new magnet programs to tackle the racially unbalanced student populations at New Lebanon and Hamilton Avenue Schools, as well as overcrowding at New Lebanon, the draft said. The proposal would also address the under-use of North Street and Parkway, two schools whose enrollments during the next 10 years are predicted to decline, according to a recent report by the Milone & MacBroom consulting firm.

"Both partial magnets will center on models for learning that augment the rich offering of innovative and differentiated approaches to instruction, content and educational opportunities within the district," said the preliminary draft proposal.

Learning models, or themes, for the partial magnets have not been determined. The district, meanwhile, is set to hire a market research firm to conduct a study whose scope will include polling elementary families on factors that would persuade them to send their children to a school outside their attendance area. No decisions about the design of new magnet models will be made until the market research has been completed and shared, according to a letter from McKersie and other administrators included with the preliminary draft.

The proposal also calls for strengthening and sustaining efforts to close the academic achievement gap in the district, with an emphasis on New Lebanon and Hamilton Avenue, the two schools that have generally posted lower standardized test scores in recent years compared to the other Greenwich elementaries.

Another key component of the preliminary plan would look closely at overcrowding at New Lebanon, whose enrollment has increased substantially in recent years.

"We've got to be thinking about an approach there to alleviate the overcrowding, regardless of what happens with the magnets," McKersie said.

No redistricting is included in the preliminary proposal, although that absence does not preclude the school board from pursuing minimal redistricting.

A partial-magnet framework would accommodate all students in the Parkway and North Street attendance areas, as well as magnet pupils from other parts of town, who would choose to enroll at those schools. Parkway and North Street respectively have projected enrollments of about 210 and 360 for the upcoming school year, according to Milone & MacBroom. Those totals equate to facility use rates of 81 percent at North Street and 68 percent at Parkway. The district's target rate is 95 percent for each school.

Lori Fields, a Parkway parent, said the magnet idea merited further investigation.

"Parkway is a very special place, and, as a community, we want to make sure that any change will improve the academic achievement of our students and will preserve the neighborhood character of the school," she said.

Greenwich currently has magnet programs at New Lebanon, Hamilton Avenue, ISD and Julian Curtiss School. But the district's magnet-student total has declined during the last two years, as those schools' enrollment of neighborhood students has risen.

"Once we have a sense from the board as to how we want to proceed with all of this, there will be very active parent and teacher involvement at the affected schools," McKersie added.

Board of Education Chairman Leslie Moriarty could not be reached for comment before press time.

The school board's meeting is scheduled to start at 7 p.m. at Cos Cob School at 300 East Putnam Ave. The meeting will be run as a work session, which means that it will not include public comment.